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Steam, Source Engine Get First-Rate Love On Mac OS X

Phoronix: Steam, Source Engine Get First-Rate Love On Mac OS X

Valve, the makers of the popular Half-Life and Counter-Strike franchises (along with numerous other titles) and the company behind the Steam software delivery system, have announced today that they are now bringing their games (including Steam) over to Mac OS X. Not only are they bringing these games over, but they intend to provide first-rate support for Apple's operating system. As is mentioned in today's press release, "We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360...

My guess is that they will release steam and their source games to linux too. Considering there is almost as many linux users as there is mac osx users and they now only depends on open source libraries.

The most difficult part of supporting linux, is the many flavors of distributions and version of different libraries.

Awesome. This does make me wonder whether the default for newer Valve games coming out might actually switch to OpenGL (to ease their development/maintenance burdens). This could make it much easier to run Valve's games under Wine in the future as well, and hopefully other developers will follow in their footsteps (re OpenGL vs. DX).

Even if this doesn't help Wine, I'm still happy, as it means I just saved myself a possible purchase of Crossover Games for Mac OS, and my laptop will spend less time running Windows (almost a shame, since I just installed Win7 on it this weekend).

My guess is that they will release steam and their source games to linux too. Considering there is almost as many linux users as there is mac osx users and they now only depends on open source libraries.

The most difficult part of supporting linux, is the many flavors of distributions and version of different libraries.

Well, it doesn't hurt. But there's a looong list of games released for both Windows and OS X using cross platform game engines, but will never see the light of day on Linux. The technical details isn't that important.

That said, it's a good day for OpenGL in general. Having yet another great engine using OpenGL will probably make it a little bit easier to convince developers to use it.

Some new games for Windows nowadays come with DirectX 9, DirectX 10 *and* DirectX 11 render paths and I don't think the developers find this funny at all. OpenGL 3.3 isn't too far away now is it and it should be able to do quite a lot of stuff that is needed.

Awesome. This does make me wonder whether the default for newer Valve games coming out might actually switch to OpenGL (to ease their development/maintenance burdens). This could make it much easier to run Valve's games under Wine in the future as well, and hopefully other developers will follow in their footsteps (re OpenGL vs. DX).

All of the important platforms support DirectX. One of those platforms requires DirectX as there is no OpenGL support on the XBox at all. Only the fringe platforms of OS X and Linux require OpenGL. Other platforms like PS3 and Wii do not use OpenGL (PS3 has a half-assed OpenGL ES API that no real developers actually use).

Linux support is likely a distant thought for Valve. OS X has a much larger "real" desktop install base than Linux after the massive growth spurt OS X has seen in recent years, especially amongst college kids and young professinals (the target market for most games being the 20-40 year old bracket). OS X also has actually usable video drivers, where as on Linux you pretty still need the binary NVIDIA drivers for any non-trivial graphics stuff.